RECORDS: Rock

Black Grape: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid (Radioactive, CD/LP/tape). It's known as Portishead Syndrome: your debut album is a critical and commercial triumph, not because of its individual songs necessarily, but because of a particular mood which your genius producer has captured. He has captured it so completely, in fact, that there is nowhere left for you to go, and your second album sounds uncomfortably like a postscript to your first.

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid is once again a delirious, National Lampoon's Animal House orgy of a record, shackling together funk, hip-hop, dance and rock to unprecedentedly hedonistic effect. Ryder honks yet more obscene nursery rhymes, and again he is outshone by Kermit, his raucous gospel- preaching partner. The band do acknowledge the progression of musical fashion over the past two years - "Rubber Band" is like Beck remixed by the Prodigy - but almost all of the tracks follow the same groove-based formula as It's Great When You're Straight ... Yeah, and they could be tacked on that album without anyone noticing the join. Judged according to the amount of intoxicating pleasure it engenders in the listener, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid is a triumph, but, like the sequel to a classic film, it's disappointing and almost redundant by definition.